Optimisfits Read online

  So, I took ahold of my dream, believed in it, and did all the hard work I needed to do to make it come true. I worked hard. I sweated to the point of exhaustion. I ground it out. I failed, learned something from the failure, failed again, and then learned some more.

  It was bitter before it was sweet.

  And guess what? My dreams have come true, and what’s more, I feel like I’m only at the beginning of the journey.

  Because I didn’t want to say yes to the well-adjusted and the average when I could be maladjusted and a savage!

  I’m sure you have your own dreams. They probably look a lot different than mine. Which is good. It is in our uniqueness that we can make the most impact for God and others.

  When you have the courage to pursue your own dream you are probably going to look like a misfit to the people around you.

  But really, who cares?

  Say no to conformity and expectations and ordinary-ness.

  Nourish your inner rebel.

  To do that you’ll need some encouragement nourishment, and that’s one of the things this book is all about.

  When Henry Ford was first introduced to the famous inventor, Thomas Edison, it was as “the man trying to build a car that runs on gasoline.” Upon hearing those words, Edison’s face lit up and he slammed down his fist in excitement. “You’ve got it. A car that has its own power plant; that’s a brilliant idea.”

  Up to that point, Ford had mostly met with ridicule and naysaying whenever he talked about his project. He’d come very close to giving up. But Edison’s words ignited a new burst of confidence and became an important turning point in Ford’s life.

  “I thought I had a good idea, but I started to doubt myself,” Ford once said. “Then came along one of the greatest minds that’s ever lived and gave me his complete approval.” This simple vote of confidence helped launch the automotive industry.

  I hope this book is a vote of confidence for your dreams, so that when it comes to visioneering your future, you’ll give everything…but up!

  2

  MISFITS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

  Sometimes it isn’t easy to be a misfit.

  If there were a Misfit Hall of Fame, then it would probably include such famous ones as Charlie Brown or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. They were misfits who found their way despite everything that stood in their path.

  For these misfits there is a certain kind of innocence and childlikeness that is both their strength…and their weakness.

  They eventually triumph, but not before they miss kicking a few footballs and end up flat on their back, or detour to the land of misfit toys on their way to the North Pole.

  You gotta love them.

  Even if you don’t want to be them.

  But there is another kind of misfit—more antiestablishment and rebellious.

  When you tell them to stay in their lane, to color within the lines, to toe the party line, or to do as they’ve been told—well, that just isn’t happening.

  They are the resistance.

  They stand against the System.

  Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, the Beat Poets, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, and Jonas from The Giver. Real or fictional, these are people who refuse to bow to a System that is slowly killing people from the inside out.

  Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and G.K. Chesterton were also misfits, rebels against a cold and boring world, and against a cold and boring form of Christianity.

  Why fit in?

  All of these people—real and imaginary—are people who marched to the beat of a different drummer.

  And if you listen carefully, maybe you can hear the rhythm of rebelliousness too.

  Let me tell you a story about a young preacher named Vincent.

  He was an idealistic man of profound faith who wanted to serve others and share the gospel with them. He had been an art dealer but became disenchanted with that enterprise, so he decided to take a position as a missionary among the miners in a small Belgian mining town. A student of the New Testament, Vincent took its commands literally and chose to live a simple life, sharing the impoverished conditions of his small congregation. He shunned wealth and prestige.

  He gave away most of his possessions and even became homeless for a time, sometimes sleeping in a haystack behind the home of the town baker.

  Can you picture this in your mind’s eye? Vincent would get up to preach before the congregation with bits of hay sticking to his clothes and the smell of bread wafting off him. The people loved him for his simple kindness and the passion with which he shared the gospel of Christ.

  Vincent was committed to living like Jesus.

  But the authorities of the missionary organization decided to pull their financial support from him. They thought it was unseemly for a preacher to live in the same kind of poverty as the people to whom he ministered. And his passionate faith embarrassed their dignified religiosity. Though he no longer had their support, Vincent tried to stay and serve his little flock, but his health soon began to fail.

  And he felt like a failure.

  In his spare time Vincent had begun to draw and paint, so now he decided to pursue a different dream—that of being an artist.

  This disenfranchised, misfit, failure of a preacher became one of the most famous artists of modern times—Vincent van Gogh.

  When, later in life, he painted his great masterpiece, “The Starry Night,” Vincent envisioned a brilliant swirling night sky full of luminous stars above a small village filled with houses lit up against the darkness. But one of the buildings in the painting remained dark. There was no light coming from the church.

  The church he had served faithfully had become a closed door for him.

  If you, like me and like Vincent, have felt that religion has failed you, remember that you are not alone. The same thing happened to Jesus. The religious authorities of His day colluded with the Roman Empire to kill the young, idealistic Jew.

  When you feel like your plans and passions have led to a dead end, remember that God has something bigger in store for you. The young missionary who preached to a tiny congregation became a painter whose artistry gave billions a glimpse of God’s glory.

  If your plans don’t work out, maybe it’s just because God has better ones for you.

  If you can’t see your way in the dark night of life, perhaps you need to look up at the swirling, shimmering stars and embrace God’s hope.

  If you are a misfit you’ll probably have to do battle with the temptation to become deeply pessimistic.

  When you are different from the rest of the world, you see through its shallowness and falsity and fakery and phoniness. And pretty soon you might start to think that everything is shallow and false and fake and phony.

  That can make you start to get cynical and skeptical and negative.

  Note: There is a lot to be said for being realistic and asking good questions. I’m not asking anyone to become a simple-minded Pollyanna. Asking the right questions can save us from swallowing a pack of lies and deceptions.

  But…

  The danger of cynicism and skepticism is that they can make you a Grumpy Gus. They can stifle your sense of The Possible. They can turn you into a smug curmudgeon who stares out at the world from an ivory tower and judges everyone else to be ignorant, and therefore only worth ignoring.

  And, honestly, it just takes a lot of the fun out of living.

  When that happens, it is just another way that the System wins.

  The only way to do battle with a debilitating pessimism is to embrace a fanatical optimism.

  When you can be absurdly optimistic in the face of all the things that seem to be arrayed against you, you take away all their power to control your emotions, your decisions, and your sense of happiness.

  When you see all the falseness of the world your vision no longer is opaque. You can see through it to a deeper and more satisfying dreamality. You can get a perspective that isn’t limited by this world, but see
s a bigger picture.

  In the face of everything that might try to bring us down, we can be optimists. Not people who approach life with an empty, plastic smile, but who make a choice to be happy in the face of life’s pain. We can turn situations that are painful into painfuel, driving us onward to our destiny. We don’t react to hardship, we respond to hardship. We are possessed of a kind of cheerful stoicism with a strength that moves heaven and earth.

  That’s how my friends and I are approaching life.

  We embrace extremism. After all, there’s no such thing as a moderate revolutionary. And Jesus didn’t die to make us safe. He died to make us dangerous.

  We are optimists.

  We are misfits.

  We are Optimisfits.

  3

  OF POOH BEAR, JESUS, AND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE…

  Okay, let’s get something out of the way right here.

  The folks with the plastic smiles have always annoyed me. You know the type: all big grins and pretending that the sky is just about to start raining donuts of joy with all the sprinkles.

  I know that sounds judgmental, but I just can’t help myself. I’m trying to tell the truth in this book, and that’s the truth.

  Here’s the way I see it…

  When a person refuses to look honestly at the messy parts of life, the pretending that everything is okay all the time and plastering their face with a goofy grin that ignores all the very real pain, it drives me bonkers. When they come bounding into the room like Tigger, it just makes me feel even more like Eeyore. When they imply that they have some secret pass to the Land of Awesomeness and that I’m missing out on the great time they’re having, I just want to say “no thanks.” I can do without their kind of optimism if it means traveling with my eyes closed to the struggles of life.

  I wish I could take hold of both sides of their face, look them in the eye, and say, “Really? You must be kidding me. Wake up!” The world isn’t a place that rains jellybeans and Skittles.

  Or.

  Do they know something I don’t know?

  Or is it just that I think there is a more substantive kind of optimism available.

  Maybe these smile-a-minute chaps are so busy with life’s exclamation points that they can ignore the question marks. They probably think that a question mark is just an exclamation mark that got bent out of shape. But I can’t ignore the questions…and I have a lot of them.

  Religious optimists are the worst kind. I often require an aspirin after talking with them.

  They often aren’t really thinking for themselves. They just parrot a lot of nice little Christian phrases about how happy they are because “after all, brother, God is good all the time and all the time God is good.” But I’m not convinced they really believe this. They’re busy downplaying the pain of life instead of being really honest about the fact there is a darkness and sickness within us that is the very thing Jesus came into the world to heal. Kierkegaard called it the “sickness unto death.” I don’t think he’d have much patience with this fake cheeriness either—these Band-Aids slapped onto gaping wounds.

  Marx argued that religion was the opiate of the people. And many churchgoers are unwittingly brainwashed into confirming his critique. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. You can see the evidence at the corner of their smiles.

  This kind of approach doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with real spirituality. This is just another form of Churchianity. Just another manifestation of religion.

  No thanks.

  There is a lot about life that is confusing and painful. Stuff that just doesn’t make much sense to me. I am left with a whole bunch of questions:

  Why does it seem like most of my relationships come with non-rechargeable batteries that eventually seem to drain out and die?

  Why do I have to see suffering so close-up? Last week as I was driving somewhere with my buddy Cam, we watched as one of the cars in front of us hit a baby deer that was crossing the road. It got caught underneath the vehicle, tumbling and thumping along until it came careening out from underneath. The driver peeled away without batting an eye, fleeing the scene. We pulled off to the side of the road and watched as another driver got out of his car and dragged the (still living) deer’s face across the pavement so that oncoming traffic could continue going nowhere fast. Why did I have to watch the fuzzy belly rise and fall as Cam put his hand on the little guy to ease his pain as death rattled in his throat? He kept gently stroking that soft fur until all the life had disappeared from the little fawn. This made me want to cry.

  Why do I sometimes feel so sad that I can’t cry?

  Why did I get beat by chronic depression for ten years?

  And why did I smile like everything was fine?

  Why did David Foster Wallace, one of our greatest modern writers, kill himself? He was a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker, but even he couldn’t figure out how to survive. He once said that suicide was a lot like jumping out of a burning building. It’s not that you’re not afraid of falling; it’s just that falling is the lesser of two terrors. I guess he took his own words to heart.

  Why did my sister die?

  The memory is etched like psychic acid on my brain. I remember being eight years old and sitting in my classroom thinking about precisely nothing when my next-door neighbor came into class and approached my teacher. It was a wintry day, and my neighbor’s eyes were the same gray as the slushy snow outside the classroom window, the leftover kind you wish would just melt away already. As she walked me home, she wouldn’t tell me why I was being taken out of school. I guessed that maybe my family was going to throw a surprise party for me. Instead, I felt something strange and heavy hanging in the air when I walked into the living room. The room was not as light as it should have been for that time of day, as though the lamps were struggling against the darkness and gloom. My family was all gathered around, looking confused as the tears formed in their eyes. My dad looked up and told me that my sister was in heaven now. She’d been in a car accident. She was only sixteen.

  And so it goes.

  This is what the world really looks like. It’s not too difficult to become a pessimist.

  I refuse to become a pessimist. I don’t want to be the guy who sees the glass completely empty or the guy who sees a cloud in every silver lining or the guy who can give you ten good reasons why you should be miserable.

  Maybe part of the problem is that I’m a little bit jealous of the people who are always happy. Because once I was one of those people.

  When I was young, I was a flaming optimist. I was always happy and upbeat. A veritable lump of sunshine. In high school I was voted student body president, won the homecoming crown, and was a star basketball player—one of the leading scorers in Orange County, California. I was living the dream. I’d sometimes have as many as 200 people at my house for Bible studies or to play a game of basketball in our pool. I would often go to the beach after school and join my friends at Disneyland on the weekends. I dated the homecoming queen.

  Life was a party.

  And then, in the middle of my senior year, my perfect world came crashing down around my ears. The truth about how harsh this world can be finally caught up with me. I found myself face-to-face with what Churchill called “the black dog of depression” and everything changed. I can’t even tell you exactly what went wrong or what chain of events led me to this dark place.

  My optimism circled the drain and disappeared down a dark hole of hopelessness.

  I had lived many years with a carefully applied smile on the outside while I was dying on the inside. In fact, I really wanted to die. I toyed with the thought of suicide and about how I might most effectively accomplish such a task.

  My faith in God began to vanish, and Christianity began to seem fake. I was beginning to awaken to the suspicion that I’d fallen for an effective sales pitch, but was now unsure about the product I’d invested in. Perhaps Jack Kerouac was right. Maybe God was just Pooh Bear; a helpful figment of my
imagination which existed to make me feel better. I wondered.

  When I got honest with my friends, I found that they were struggling in the same way I was. They didn’t know how to integrate the dark thoughts and realizations about life into their day-to-day experiences. They couldn’t make sense of the pain. And the form of faith they learned in church didn’t offer much help either. So, they became angsty, cynical, hopeless, and sad. For them, as for me, the Hallmark-card, fortune-cookie adages offered by religion didn’t cut it anymore. We couldn’t live with such a denial of reality.

  I hated being so pessimistic, but I couldn’t jump on the bandwagon of churchy optimism either. Are these really the only two options? I asked myself. Being a gloomy agnostic or a simpleminded Christian?

  There has to be a third alternative, right? A way of looking at life that embraces authentic hope and ultimate meanings, while at the same time isn’t afraid to be honest about the pain and confusion and misery that we sometimes experience in the course of living as a human being?

  Well, I stumbled upon a third alternative.

  It’s what I refer to as being an Optimisfit.

  What, you ask, is an Optimisfit? Well, as the name implies, it is someone who embraces his or her misfit identity and doesn’t neatly fit inside the comfortable religious box…but who manages to hold on to a wildly optimistic view of life even in the face of all the darkness around us. The Optimisfit knows that life doesn’t come with nice, neat right angles.